Jew Farmers

The axiom that Jews are always plentiful as traders but scarce as tillers of the soil has been rudely upset by the Soviet regime in Russia. The State monopoly of trade has crowded out Jewish traders and forced them to scratch and sow the ground. During 1927 not less than 8,000 Russian retailers became farmers, according to Soviet statistics. Last week this process of readjustment, painful to Jews, seemed about to be smoothed by a philanthropic gift of $5,000,000 from famed Julius Rosenwald, chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co. (mail orders).

Mr. Rosenwald announced that his gift would be made on condition that an additional $5,000,000 be subscribed by other philanthropists. He selected as the recipient of this contingent contribution the parent board, of the so-called Agro-Joint or "American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation." Though little famed, the Corporation has been functioning since 1924 in an effort to get Jews established as painlessly as possible on the rich farm lands granted them by the Soviet State in the Ukraine, Crimea and White Russia.

The Director of Agro-Joint is gray-haired and twinkling-eyed Dr. Joseph A, Rosen, a Russian-born agricultural expert who migrated to the U. S. but went. back to Russia after the War to assist the famine relief conducted by omnipresent Herbert Hoover.

Out of Dr. Rosen's work at that time in instructing Russians how to farm efficiently and rotate their crops came the founding of Agro-Joint, at his suggestion, with the financial support of a parent board, the so-called J. D. C. or "Joint Distribution Committee" (of the U. S.) which is now chairmanned by famed Felix M. Warburg, Manhattan banking tycoon.

From the founding of Agro-Joint in 1924 up to the present year, it has loaned out more than $3,000,000 to Jewish farmers in Soviet Russia and spent more than $400,000 in educating them in modern agricultural methods. The new subscription which was announced by Philanthropist Rosenwald, last week, will so broaden the work of Agro-Joint that it will merge into a new corporation to be founded for Jewish land settlement in Russia.